While most individuals think of bee colonies for the production of honey, bees have a very important role in the pollination of a variety of plants. It is estimated that certain bees can pollinate an estimated 100 different crops. The need for commercial bee colonies is great, as the amount of bees found in the wild could not perform the pollination required for commercial crops in a timely manner. Bee colonies housed in artificial beehives provide commercial growers of various crops the ability to have their crops pollinated in shorter periods of time and ripen at controlled intervals, thereby saving growers the expense of having to harvest smaller crops several times throughout the particular crop season.
Although beehives can assume any shape and size, the Langstroth beehive is the most common design. It was named after Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth who designed this style in 1860. The basic design includes use of standard sized rectangular boxes having no tops or bottoms, hive bodies, and internal frames which allow for interchangeable part capability. The hive bodies are constructed of several pieces of wood materials which are secured together thereby to form the overall structure. While this type of construction produces sturdy beehives, using multiple pieces individually secured to each other increases the risk that the pieces become non-functional over time and thus require replacement, and additionally requires initial preparation of each of the individual wood pieces, i.e. painting, which could be harmful to the colony, and increases the cost associated with shipping an intact unit or the several pieces which make up the unit.